Drawing on mythology and esoteric traditions and delving deeply into the symbolism and ideas of each card, the book offers a modern psychological interpretation of the tarot archetypes rather than a system of esoteric symbolism. The Minor Arcana show the human responsibility to fulfill cosmic needs, to enable nature to heal itself, and spiritual truth to be realized in the physical world. All seventy-eight cards are explored from fresh angles: history, art, psychology, and a variety of spiritual and occult traditions, using cards from seven diverse decks so you can easily contrast and compare.
No matter where your starting point on the path of personal discovery, this tarot book will prove a trusted companion for your journey. Renowned author Rachel Pollack has spent more than forty years studying and practicing Tarot. This insightful guide distills her vast knowledge and offers a direct, accessible approach to mastering the cards. This book will teach you the meanings of the cards and enable you to begin doing compelling readings right away. More seasoned readers will find that this basic reference has a richness and depth that will call you back again and again to discover your own truth within the cards.
Find new descriptions and divinatory meanings with a modern twist Learn not only what each card signifies, but how to discover what it means to you Enhance your understanding of the cards with information about numbers, elements, astrology, and Kabbalah Try the unique spreads inspired by each Major Arcana card Understand Tarot's rich history, including Eden Gray's immense influence. Mysterious masked dancers, sleepers in dream temples, dark spirits rising from canyon walls--based on tribal and prehistoric art from around the world, and rooted in the wisdom and tradition of the Tarot itself, this magnificent deck uses images from the very origins of art.
The kit includes a comprehensive guide to the deck along with poetry by creator Rachel Pollack. Designed for beginning as well as experienced tarot readers, Holistic Tarot offers a fresh and easy-to-follow approach to the use of the tarot deck for tapping into subconscious knowledge and creativity. The tarot deck has been used as a divination tool for more than two centuries; while the tarot is still most commonly thought of as "fortune telling," the true power of the tarot lies in its ability to channel a clear path for our deep intuition to shine through.
Consulting the tarot can help clear creativity blockages, clarify ambitions, work through complex decisions, and make sense of emotions and relationships. Whether used for simple decision-making or an understanding of your life's purpose, learning tarot can be an indispensible tool for being more mindful of the factors that can assist or weaken your efforts toward success.
In Holistic Tarot, author Benebell Wen provides a complete guide to using the tarot to foster personal development. Wen gives a comprehensive overview of the history of the tarot and a wide array of theories on its use including its relationship to Jungian archetypal psychology and traditional Chinese divination practices before digging deeply into one of the best-known tarot systems, the Rider-Waite-Smith.
Beginners will find a complete guide to working with the tarot, including choosing and caring for a deck, how best to learn and remember the attributes of the major and minor arcana, the interpretation of cards and spreads, the role of meditation in a tarot practice, and how to use the tarot for improving relationships, professional development, and personal resilience. More advanced practitioners will appreciate nuanced theoretical discussions of the tarot as well as practical advice about reading others' tarot cards and setting up a practice.
Containing over illustrations and detailed information on each card as well as numerous spreads, Holistic Tarot is a complete compendium of tarot study that every practitioner should have in his or her library. This is the only guide you need to have. It's also innovative: it deftly combines Eastern mysticism with Western metaphysics. It's an impressive tome that presents a wholly modern, rational approach to tarot practice while preserving notable elements of tradition.
Tarot Plain and Simple by Anthony Louis is the book you've been waiting for! As the title indicates, this book presents the Tarot in clear language that anyone can understand. If you've had trouble learning the Tarot, this book gives the meaning of each and every one of the 78 Tarot cards—both in simple terms and in-depth ones, both upright interpretations and those for when a card is drawn reversed. Illustrations are from the elegant and mystic Robin Wood Tarot.
This book leaves nothing out! It includes an overview of the history of the Tarot and suggests why this divinatory method works from a scientific point of view. Want to Read.
Delete Note Save Note. Download for print-disabled. Check nearby libraries Library. Share this book Facebook. Last edited by CoverBot. May 22, History. An edition of 78 Degrees Of Wisdom This edition was published in January 25, by Thorsons Written in English — pages.
Software Images icon An illustration of two photographs. Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses. Seventy eight degrees of wisdom : a book of tarot, part I: the major arcana Item Preview. EMBED for wordpress. Want more? Now, the Hebrew alphabet contains, as noted, twenty-two letters, the same number as the trumps of Tarocchi.
T hey represent the four worlds of creation, the four basic elements of medieval science, four stages of existence, four methods of interpreting the Bible, and so on. Finally, the Kabbalah works with the number ten - the Ten Commandments and ten Sephiroth stages of emanation on each of the four Trees of Life. And the four suits contain cards numbered from one to ten.
Do we wonder then that Tarot commentators have claimed that the deck originated as a pictorial version of the Kabbalah, meaningless to the masses, but highly potent to the few? And yet, in all the thousands of pages of Kabbalistic literature, not one word appears about the Tarot.
Occultists have claimed secret sources for the cards, such as a grand conference of Kabbalists and other Masters in Morocco in. Even more damning, Tarot commentators themselves do not mention the Kabbalah until the nineteenth century. And yet, such exact and complete correspondences as the twenty-two trumps, the four court cards and ten pip cards in the four suits, or the position and ecstatic face of the Hanged Man, would seem to strain even such a potent force as the Collective Unconscious.
For years Tarrochi was seen primarily as a game for gambling, and to a much lesser extent as a device for fortune-telling. T hen, in the eighteenth century, an occultist named Antoine Court de Gebelin declared the Tarot as the French called the game to be the remnant of the Book of Thoth, created by the Egyptian god of magic to convey all knowledge to his disciples.
Today, we see the Tarot as a kind of path, a way to personal growth through understanding of ourselves and life. For Bembo and whoever his predecessors might have been did create an archetype, whether consciously or from deep instinct. Beyond any system or detailed explanations, the images themselves, changed and elaborated over the years by different artists, fascinate and entrance us.
In this way they draw us into their mysterious world which ultimately can never be explained, but only experienced. Most modern Tarots differ very little from those fifteenth-century sets of cards. True, some of the pictures have changed considerably, but each version usually keeps the same basic concept.
For example,. In general, the changes have tended towards the more symbolic and the more mystical. Waite was criticized for changing some of the trump cards from their accepted version. Waite changed it to one child on a horse riding out of a garden. This was probably the case, since Waite believed more strongly in his own ideas than those of anyone else. The most striking change Waite and his artist, Pamela Colman Smith, made was to include a scene on all the cards, including the numbered cards of the Minor Arcana.
For example, the ten of Swords will show ten swords arranged in a pattern, much like its descendant, the ten of spades.
The Rider pack is different. We do not really know who actually designed these cards. W hether it was Waite or Smith who designed the pictures, they had a powerful effect on later Tarot designers.
Almost all decks with scenes on every card rely very heavily on the pictures in the Rider pack. W hen he so drastically altered the card of the Lovers, for instance, he did so because he thought the old picture insignificant and his new one symbolic of a deep truth.
Waite was a mystic, an occultist, and a student of magic and esoteric practices. He based his Tarot on deep personal experience of enlightenment. He believed his Tarot to be right and the others wrong because it represented that experience. I have chosen the Rider pack as my source for two reasons. First, I find many of its innovations extremely valuable.
T he Waite-Smith version of the Fool strikes me as more meaningful than any of the earlier ones. Secondly, the revolutionary change in the Minor Arcana seems to me to free us from the formulas that dominated the suit cards for so long.
Previously, once you read and memorized the given meanings of a Minor card you could not really add to it; the picture suggested very little. In the Rider pack we can allow the picture to work on the subconscious; we can also apply our own experience to it. This book, however, looks upon the cards more as an archetype of experience. Seen that way no deck is right or wrong, but is simply a furthering of the archetype.
T he Tarot is both the total of all the different versions over the years, and an entity apart. Strangely, we know less historically about this aspect of the cards than any other. Or individuals developed the concept the earliest written references are individual interpretations, though they might have derived from some earlier system, not written down but in general use and the Romany took it from them.
The fact is, the Romany probably came from India, and they arrived in Spain a good hundred years after Tarot cards were introduced in Italy and France. In the section on readings we will consider just what divination does, and how such an outrageous practice could possibly work.
The practice stems from the simple desire to know, in advance, what is going to happen, and more subtly, from the inner conviction that everything is connected, everything has meaning and that nothing occurs at random. The very idea of randomness is really very modern. It developed out of the dogma that cause and effect is the only valid connection between two events. Previously, however, people thought in. The pattern of tea leaves in the bottom of a cup corresponds to the outcome of a battle.
Everything is connected. If we can use anything for fortune-telling why use the Tarot? The answer is that any system will tell us something; the value of that something depends on the inherent wisdom of the system.
Because the Tarot pictures carry deep significance all by themselves, the patterns they form in readings can teach us a great deal about ourselves, and life in general. The formula meanings are often contradictory as well as blunt, with no indications of how to choose between them. This situation holds true especially for the Minor Arcana which is the bulk of the deck. Almost no works on the Tarot have treated this subject fully. Most serious studies, those which deal with the deep meanings of the Major Arcana, either do not mention the Minor cards at all, or simply throw in another set of formulas at the back, as a grudging addition for those readers who will insist on using the deck for fortune-telling.
Even Waite, as mentioned, simply gives his own formulas to the remarkable pictures drawn by Pamela Smith. Many writers, notably Waite, have denigrated divination as a degenerate use of the cards. Many times I have seen specific readings open up important meanings that would not have emerged in any other way. In a manner no explanation can possibly equal, they.
Finally, giving readings gives each person a chance to renew his or her instinctive feeling for the pictures themselves. Through its long history the Major Arcana has attracted a great many interpretations. Today, we tend to look upon the trumps as a psychological process, one that shows us passing through different stages of existence to reach a state of full development; we can describe this state, for the moment, as unity with the world around us, or perhaps liberation from weakness, confusion, and fear.
Look at them for a while. Notice that while both the Fool and the World show dancing, joyful figures, the Magician and the High Priestess are stationary and unmoving in their positions. They present themselves as fixed states of existence. But there is a difference between the two dancers. The Fool rushes forward richly clothed; the figure in the World is naked. Note also the numbers of the four cards. It symbolizes infinite potentiality. All things remain possible because.
But 2 1 combines these two numbers in one figure. Look at their postures. The Magician raises a magic wand to heaven. The High Priestess sits between two pillars, a vaginal symbol as well as a symbol of duality. These two pillars appear again and again in the Major Arcana, in such obvious places as the temple in the Hierophant, and in more subtle ways, like the two lovers on card 6, or the two sphinxes harnessed to the Chariot.
But now look at the World. The dancer, a female figure though some decks represent her as a hermaphrodite carries two magic wands, one in each hand.
The male and female are unified, and more, their separate qualities are subordinated to the higher freedom and joy shone in the light way the dancer holds these powerful symbols. Clearly, then, while the horizontal line, the Magician and the High Priestess, shows a duality of opposites, the vertical line, 0 and 21, shows a unity, the Fool being some sort of perfect state before duality, and the World giving us a glimpse of the exhilarating sense of freedom possible if only we can reconcile the opposites buried in our psyches.
The Tarot, like many systems of thought, indeed like many mythologies, symbolizes duality as the separation of male and female. In most cultures, to a greater or lesser degree, men and women see each other as very distinct, almost separate societies. Today, many people think of each person as having both masculine and feminine qualities, but previously such an idea was found only in esoteric doctrines of unification.
If we picture duality dramatically as male and female, or black and white, we also experience more subtle splits in our ordinary lives, especially between our hopes, what we imagine as possible, and the reality of what we achieve. Very often the actions we take. The marriage gives less than the total happiness expected , the job or career brings more frustration than fulfilment.
Many artists have said that the paintings on the canvases are never the paintings they envisioned; they never can express what they really wanted to say. Somehow the reality of life is always less than the potential. Acutely aware of this, many people agonize over every decision, no matter how small or great, because they cannot accept that once they take an action in one direction they have lost the chance to go in all the other directions previously open to them.
They cannot accept the limitations of acting in the real world. The split between potentiality and reality is sometimes seen as the separation between mind and body. We sense that our thoughts and emotions are something distinct from our physical presence in the world. The body is weak, subject to hunger, tiredness, sickness. Attempting to resolve this separation people have gone to philosophical extremes.
We sense that deep down our true nature is something stronger, freer, with great wisdom and power; or else a thing of violent passions and furious animal desire. Either way, we know that this true self hides, or perhaps lies buried deep inside our normal, socially restricted personalities. But how do we reach it? Assuming the essential self to be a thing of beauty and power, how do we liberate it? People often confuse the purposes of spiritual disciplines.
Many think the Tarot is for fortune-telling, that alchemists want to become rich by changing lead to gold, that Kabbalists work spells by saying secret words, and so on. In reality, these disciplines aim at a psychological unification.
Accepting the doctrine that we have fallen from a perfect state to a limited one the occultist does not believe we must simply wait passively for some future redemption by an outside agent.
On the contrary, he or she believes it our responsibility to bring about that redemption by finding the key to unity. It is not the key, just as it is not really a secret doctrine.
It represents a process, and one of the things it teaches us is that we make a mistake when we assume that unification comes through any simple key or formula. Rather, it comes through growth and increased awareness as we travel step by step through the twenty-one stages of the Major Arcana. Perhaps such a radiant self never really existed. Somehow we experience our intuition of it as something lost.
Virtually every culture has developed a myth of a Fall from a primeval paradise. It is sexuality expressed without fear, without guilt, without connivance and dishonesty. It is sexuality expressed spontaneously and freely, as the expression of love and the ecstasy of life. The Fool bears the number 0 because all things are possible to the person who is always ready to go in any direction.
He does not belong in any specific place; he is not fixed like the other cards. Every moment is a new starting point. In Arabic numerals the number 0 bears the shape of an egg, to indicate that.
Originally the zero was written as a dot; in Hermetic and Kabbalistic tradition the universe emerged from a single point of light.
Those Tarot commentators who argue whether the Fool belongs before, after, or somewhere between the other cards seem to be missing the point. The Fool is movement, change, the constant leap through life. For the Fool no difference exists between possibility and reality. He responds instantly to the immediate situation. Other people will receive his complete spontaneity. He does not do this deliberately, like someone consciously deciding to be wholly honest with a friend or a lover.
The Fool gives his honesty and love naturally, to everyone, without ever thinking about it. The Fool and the Dancer are psychic hermaphrodites, expressing their complete humanity at all times, by their very natures.
Now look again at the four card pattern. See how the Fool splits into the Magician and the High Priestess, who must be brought back together again to form the World.
The World shows us a restored unity, but a higher and deeper unity achieved through the growth outlined in the other eighteen cards. The fool is innocence, but the World is wisdom. But most of us cannot maintain even brief moments of such spontaneity and freedom. Due to fears, conditioning, and simply the. Once we lose that innocence, however, we cannot simply climb back to the level of the Fool. T he Magician represents action, the High Priestess passivity, the Magician maleness, the High Pr iestess femaleness, the Magician consciousness, the High Priestess unconsciousness.
W hat greater creativity is there than giving shape to the chaos of experience? It is the Magician who gives life its meaning and purpose. Healers, ar tists, and occultists have all focused on the Magician as their patron card. Nevertheless, his power represents an isolation from the freedom of the Fool or the understanding of the World.
T he High Priestess represents the archetype of inner truth, but because this truth is unconscious, inexpressible, she can maintain it only through total passivity. T his situation shows itself in life in numerous ways. We all carry within us a dim sense of who we are, of a genuine self never seen by other people and impossible to explain.
Now, directly opposite to these people, the Buddhist monk or nun withdraws from the world because the slightest involvement will distract them from the centre of their meditations. Both the Magician and the High Priestess bear an archetypal purity. In the traditional split of Western and Eastern religion the Magician represents the West, with its emphasis on action and historical salvation, the High Priestess the East, the way of separation from the world and time.
Yet those who have gone deepest in both traditions will combine these elements. The High Priestess sits between the pillars of light and dark. Though she herself symbolizes the dark passive side, her intuition can find a balance between the two. This is less paradoxical than it sounds. We can rush back and forth, going from one extreme to the other, or we can do absolutely nothing.
Therefore she sits between the two pillars of the temple. As archetypes, the Magician and the High Priestess cannot exist in our lives any more than the Fool can. In other words, the purity of the two poles becomes lost because life muddles them together.
The purpose of the Major Arcana is twofold. First of all, by isolating the elements of our lives into archetypes it enables us to see them in their pure forms, as aspects of psychological truth. Secondly, it helps us to truly resolve these different elements, to take us step by step through the different stages of life until it brings us to unity. In reality, perhaps the innocence symbolized by the Fool never existed.
Somehow we experience as something lost. The Major Arcana tells us how to get it back. Most interpreters of the Major Arcana take one of two approaches: either they consider the cards as separate entities or they look at them as a sequence. The Empress represents the soul glorified in nature, the Emperor mastery of self, etc. This system considers the numbers on the cards as part of their symbolic language. The second approach looks upon the trumps as a progression. The Magician is 1 because his qualities form the starting point of the growth pattern figured in the other cards.
Each new trump builds upon the previous one and leads the way to the next. In general, I have followed the second method. Comparisons with other numbers can also help us to see the limitations as well as the virtues of each card. But what kind of victory? Is it the total. The most common choice is the Wheel of Fortune. Also, if you place the Fool at the beginning this divides the cards neatly into two groups of eleven.
Most important, the idea of a turning wheel symbolizes a change of outlook, from a concern with external things, such as success and romance, to the more inward approach depicted in such cards as Death and the Star. Despite the value of seeing the Major Arcana as two halves, I have found that the trumps divide even more organically into three parts.
Setting the Fool apart as really a separate category all by itself and setting it apart allows us to see that it belongs everywhere and anywhere gives us twenty-one cards - three groups of seven. The number seven has a long history in symbolism: the seven planets of classical astrology, seven as a combination of three and four, themselves archetypal numbers, seven pillars of wisdom, the seven lower stations of the Tree of Life, seven openings in the human head, seven chakras, and of course, seven days in the week.
Though the idea of the seven-day week comes from ancient Israel, which may have got it from Babylon, the European names for the days come from the planets as personified in the Roman and Norse gods. One particular aspect of seven relates it directly to the Tarot. The Greek letter pi stands for a ratio that exists in all circles between the circumference and the diameter. Also, twenty-two times seven equals one hundred and fifty-four adds up to ten, linking it to the Wheel , and one hundred and fifty-four divided by two, for the two Arcana, comes to seventy-seven, the entire Tarot with the Fool again set aside.
Like the Kabbalistic conception of God the point is nothing, yet the entire circle radiates from it. The best reasons for the division into three groups lie within the Major Arcana itself. First, consider the picture symbolism. Look at the first card in each line. The Magician and Strength are both obviously cards of power, but so is the Devil. The Magician and Strength are linked by the infinity sign above their heads, while the Devil bears a reversed pentacle.
In many decks Justice, not Strength is number 8. If you look at the posture of the figure in Justice you will see an even closer resemblance to the Magician and the Devil. The same kind of vertical correspondences apply all the way through the three lines. They derive from the cards themselves. The first line, with its concentration on such matters as love, social authority, and education, describes the main concerns of society.
In many ways the world we see mirrored in our novels, ftlms, and schools is summed up by the first seven cards of the Major Arcana. A person can live and die and be judged a success by everyone around him or her without ever going beyond the level of the Chariot.
Many people, in fact, do not reach that level at all. The angel of. Finally, what of the last line? What can go beyond finding our true selves? To most readers the last line will seem too vague and fanciful. T he vagueness in our minds perhaps speaks more about ourselves and our time than about the subject. Any society automatically teaches its people, just by the language it uses, to make cer tain assumptions about the world.
Examples in our culture would include the value and uniqueness of individuals, the reality and overwhelming importance of love, the necessity of freedom and social justice, and, more complex, but just as strong, the basic separateness of each person. When we deal with the last line of the Major Arcana, then, we deal with an area uncomfortable to many of us. It w ill make the task of understanding these cards harder - and perhaps more rewarding.
Working with these ancient pictures can bring us knowledge neglected in our education. We have already looked at the Fool in one aspect, the image of a spirit totally free. But we can look at the Fool from another side the leap into the archetypal world of the trumps.
Imagine yourself entering a strange landscape. You can enter through a leap from a height, through a dark cave, a labyrinth, or even by climbing dow n a rabbit hole chasing a Victorian rabbit with a pocket watch. Whichever way you choose, you are a fool to do it. Why look into the deep world of the mind when you can stay safely in the ordinary landscape of job, home and family? Herman Melville, in Moby Dick, warned his readers not to take even a step outside the ordinary path laid out for you by society.
You might not get back again. And yet, for those willing to take the chance, the leap can bring joy, adventure, and finally, for those with the courage to keep going when the wonderland becomes more fearsome than joyous, the leap can bring k nowledge, peace, and liberation. Interestingly, the Fool archetype appears more in mythology than in structured religion. Instead, the churches offer us a safe haven from the fears of life.
Mythology leads directly into the heart of those fears, and in every culture the mythological landscape contains the image of the Trickster - pushing, goading, jabbing the kings and heroes whenever they turn away from the inner world of truth. Constantly he appears before Arthur in disguise, as a child, a beggar, an old peasant. The young king, already seduced into pompousness by his high social position, never recognizes Merlin until his companions point out that he has been tricked again.
More important than laws or military strategy is the ability to see through illusions. The Taoist masters were famous for playing tricks on their disciples. The Fool archetype has even found social expression, as the real court jester. Today, our comedians and satir ists enjoy something of the same privilege. In many countries a yearly carnival releases all the wildness repressed through the rest of the year.
Sex is freer, various laws are suspended, people go in disguises and the King of Fools is chosen to preside over the festival.
The picture beside that of the Rider pack shows the Fool as conceived by Oswald Wirth. An older tradition than that of Waite, it pictures the archetype as a grotesque wanderer.
Placing him between Judgement and the World, she describes the Fool as what the outside world sees when it looks upon someone who is truly enlightened.
Because the Fool does not follow their rules or share their weaknesses, he appears to them in this ugly distorted way. In some early Tarot decks the Fool appeared as a giant court jester, towering over the people around him.
The term has also been used for idiots, harmless madmen, and severe epileptics, all of whom were thought to be in touch with a greater wisdom precisely because they were out of touch with the rest of us. The archetype persists in modern popular mythology as well. The joker is not descended from the Fool as I, and other Tarotists, have assumed.
It does, however, call forth the same archetype as the Fool, being based on the court jester. The rivalry of Batman and the Joker sends a clear message to their readers: do not rebel against social values. Support law and order. In recent years the magazine has described the Joker as insane rather than criminal.
To society the way of the Fool, instinct rather than rules, is a dangerous insanity. Curiously the image of the Fool as self occurs more in fairy tales than myths.
In Waite the figure is a leaping dog, in others a cat or even a crocodile. The animal symbolizes the forces of nature and the animal self of man, all in harmony with the spirit who acts from instinct. Mythological dogs are often terrifying, for example, the Hound of Hell chasing lost souls. But it is really the same beast; only our attitude changes.
Deny your inner self and it becomes ferocious. Obey it and it becomes benign. Roses symbolize passion, while white, the traditional colour of purity, together with the delicate way the flower is held, indicate the passions raised to a higher level.
The Greeks saw Eros, the god of love, as a trickster, making the most proper people act ridiculous.
But those who already express their folly will not be thrown by love. The Greeks also spoke of Eros, in other forms, as the animating force of the universe. The bag behind him carries his experiences. The bag bears the head of an eagle, symbol of the soaring spirit. His high instinct fills and transforms all experience. The eagle is also the symbol of Scorpio raised to a higher level, that is, sexuality raised to spirit.
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